JUST as it is true that no one learned their native language attending grammar classes at the age of two, it is equally true that no one learned to ride a bicycle by reading a book. Both were learned by active involvement by the learner and both involved making mistakes. The correction for a mistake on a bicycle was taught by gravity and the hard ground; for language it was perhaps less severe.

The similarity between the two is the learning process. Both are learner centered, both are useful skills and neither are taught from books by teachers at the front of a class pouring knowledge into empty vessels. The educative process is about learner involvement and the outcome is about fitness for the purpose the training is designed for.

Fitting the product of the Saudi education system into the workplace is becoming increasingly difficult. The number of young work-seekers is increasing and the needs of the organizations and businesses offering employment are changing. More applicants are chasing changing targets.

The Saudi economy is becoming more industrialized and reliant on technologies not native to Saudi culture — engineering and IT, to name two. As the physical infrastructure of the Kingdom becomes larger and more complex, so do the demands for a workforce trained to build and run it. Historically, most of that workforce was imported with the technology. Why?

Saudi’s industrial revolution was unusual — perhaps unique. It came in boxes with instructions in English and someone to assemble and run it. There is no disgrace in that for the country was blessed with oil cash and the foresight to put a modern technological culture in place quickly. However, unlike the European industrial revolution that took 250 years, it did not have time to allow either the development of generations of engineers, inventors and industrial managers or the idea that respectable gainful employment could be had outside the field of management. Nor was there time to make disastrous mistakes and recover and learn from them and build that knowledge into the accumulated wealth of cultural experience.

Put another way, the bicycle was purchased, assembled and ridden by someone else. The owner never fell off to learn the lesson because he never mounted it. Instead he oversaw the operation, which he owned.

The result in the Kingdom is that the output from the secondary and first-degree levels of the education system does not match the real practical needs of modern Saudi society. Young people who hope to enter the workplace simply do not have the skills appropriate to take up the jobs in industry, engineering or the many occupations necessary to keep the country running.

Feedback from local employers consists of little other than that view. “Managers we do not need; able and skilled engineers and operators we do. We are over-blessed with the first and starved of the second,” runs their mantra. At two recent further education fairs — in Jeddah and Riyadh — applications for overseas courses were overwhelmingly for business or management studies.

With unemployment running (depending on the source of the figures) at between 13 and 30 percent (2.6 million to 6 million) amongst Saudis, there is nonetheless ample work available in the fields currently occupied by 7 million expatriate workers. Work is there; a trained Saudi workforce is not.

Fortunately there are signs of change, at least in tertiary education. Jeddah College of Technology (JCT) has twinned with technical colleges in the UK and is developing a curriculum and teaching methodology tailored to producing technicians and engineers with marketable skill-sets.

Bruce Ford, an education consultant from Castle College in Nottingham concluded his third visit to JCT last week. “One of the reasons we are here is that the college realizes that much of its teaching was didactic and teacher-centred,” he said. “Since we were last here in October, we have seen big changes, both here and in Madinah technical college.”

Ford’s brief was to “improve the teaching and the learning experience of the students.” This involved training methods and course materials, lesson planning and teaching methodology. Having closely observed teaching methods and feedback from staff and students, Ford and Steve Hedges, a curriculum development specialist from Greenwich Community College in London, gave advice to set up JCT’s “Train the Trainers” program. “That was very successful and we were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm we saw, so eager to learn and discuss ideas with us,” Ford said.

Ford noted that the ideas were not new to JCT. “They knew. I felt they just needed them independently validated,” he mused.

“I found that teachers in the classes knew how to use the IT in their classrooms, but were concerned as to how far they could go with it and student involvement and what the most effective use of the technology was without losing lesson content,” added Hedges.

Both Hedges and Ford identified what they described as “the permission issue.” They found that as a result of didactic “front-of-class” teaching the students were brought up with, there was a strong tendency among them to feel “am I allowed to do this?” when it came to making mistakes, offering opinions or actively joining in the learning process.

Ford confirmed that employers wanted students with hands-on practical experience. “It’s all very well being told how to do something. They want to see employees able to do it,” he said. “It’s about rolling your sleeves up and getting involved.”

The hard truth is that the overwhelming majority of employees will never be managers. They will provide the day-to-day operational element that the managers control and direct, and that makes them both worthy and essential parts of the nation’s infrastructure. To access that work, potential employees need both high quality training and to be engaged with a learner-centred training process.

And that might mean mounting and falling off their bicycles a few times.